ok.

so, it's taken some time, but the press is cluing in.

how many cases are there down there?

thousands. tens of thousands...

and, then, what's the mortality rate? pretty small.

but, i said this to the border people weeks ago: it's easy for me to shrug it off. i'm young and healthy. if i was 85, i'd have a different perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-testing-numbers/607714/

so many of us want the authorities to take control, and think they can defeat complicated problems by writing and enforcing the right rules. but, it doesn't work.

it doesn't help us understand physics, even if we used to think it did. it doesn't help us solve social problems, even if we wish it did.

and, it won't help us contain an epidemic, either.

if there is one thing i am sure of in this world, it is that authoritarianism is always the wrong approach - that we can't control anything, no matter how hard we try. we are at the perpetual whim of uncertainty and chaos, and we need to start to understand that and act like we do. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-09/how-coronavirus-spread-from-patient-zero-in-seattle

these researchers had a hunch that the number of cases in iran was dramatically underreported and did some math to deduce more convincing numbers, which is around 20,000 cases.

that would put the death toll in iran around 1%.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.24.20027375v1.full.pdf

access to care is only useful if the doctors take the issue seriously.

the story is still being written, but it seems like the system didn't take the issue seriously enough.

but, i still need to repeat the point that italians like to touch each other. it's crude, but it's true.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/from-confidence-to-quarantine-how-coronavirus-swept-italy

thank you to popular science for writing the article for me.

https://www.popsci.com/story/science/healthcare-paid-sick-leave-coronavirus/

again: this is a catalyst, not a cause.

it should be allowed to run it's course. 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/10/delivery-and-digital-services-thrive-on-coronavirus-outbreak

https://www.retaildive.com/news/the-impact-of-the-coronavirus-on-retail/573522/

i'm going to throw an argument out there about the fears of this hurting the economy, because it's 20th century thinking that isn't taking recent changes in consumer habits into consideration.

the concern is that people will be afraid to go shopping, which will put the economy into a recession. ok. and, that would have been an entirely reasonable concern, even ten years ago.

but, something that's happened over the last ten years is that people have stopped going to malls, anyways - they do almost all of their shopping on the internet, with the glaring exception of groceries.

now, i'm not saying that the kind of effect this will have on businesses is obvious, but i can make a few suggestions:

1) if a longterm fear of going outside kicks in, it could be the final end for certain businesses that have seen their profits come down in the internet era. these would be stores in malls that sell goods that can be easily purchased online. this should be seen as a natural die-off, and nothing should be done to help these businesses. in the end, we may look back and see this as a major catalyst to end certain retail sectors, but we shouldn't delude ourselves - the virus is not the cause of these failures, and this was happening anyways.

2) the corollary of this fear of going outside hurting brick & mortar stores would be that the business would be shifted to online stores, who could see a major uptick in sales. 

so, is stimulus pointless? no. it just needs to be understood where it's going.

and, is recession inevitable? not in totality. certain sectors may get hit, but it's likely to be more of a shift in gdp than a decline in it, because it's increasingly the case that most people do most of their shopping at home, anyways.

as was the case in 2008, we may see a restructuring kick in that signals a final nail in the coffin of these brick & mortar businesses that were dying anyways. and, as was the case in 2008, this restructuring will probably be permanent.

so, that's my read on what the smart kids do about this - they realize the shift in technology that's happening, and they adjust.

so, i would support stimulus, but i would oppose bailouts to brick & mortar stores. this shift needs to be embraced. and, that may be the longer term consequence of this.

it's a good excuse to ram through funding on carbon transition.

https://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/canada-needs-a-coronavirus-stimulus-plan-heres-what-it-should-look-like/

yeah - whoever was in here and jerked off on my bed also dismantled my firewall, and fucked with my system services.

i'm going to have to reimage this this morning.

in european history, there is a broad dividing line between the romans and the germans, going back thousands of years, with the celts lining up in between.

the romans, drawing from the greeks, are a people that believe in order and empire. they believe in a society rooted in law, and in later years they became dominated by an expression of greek philosophy called christianity.

the germans, on the other hand, were anarchists. they believed that rules should be malleable and adjustable, they believed in grassroots democracy and they rejected dominance and empire. 

i'm oversimplifying this because i don't want to write this essay right now, i just want to get the point across - i don't want to be an imperialist italian, i want to be an anarchist german. so, i will align with my mother's heritage rather than my father's.

but, i know i am both - and i know i have ancestry outside of europe, as well.in european history, there is a broad dividing line between the romans and the germans, going back thousand of years, with the celts lining up in between.

the romans, drawing from the greeks, are a people that believe in order and empire. they believe in a society rooted in law, and in later years they became dominated by an expression of greek philosophy called christianity.

the germans, on the other hand, were anarchists. they believed that rules should be malleable and adjustable, they believed in grassroots democracy and they rejected dominance and empire. 

i'm oversimplifying this because i don't want to write this essay right now, i just want to get the point across - i don't want to be an imperialist italian, i want to be an anarchist german. so, i will align with my mother's heritage rather than my father's.

but, i know i am both - and i know i have ancestry outside of europe, as well.

my mother only ever spoke english. i'd guess her father ever only spoke english; his ancestry is scottish/welsh all the way back. her mother only ever spoke english, but my mother's mother's mother's side was norwegian, and her father was irish. so, that's how far back you have to go on that side to get a culture that is not anglicized canadian.

my father spoke french, and i should probably speak better french, too. he did not speak italian. both of his parents spoke french and english, and i don't think they spoke anything else. you'd have to go back to my grandmother's parents or great grandparents before you got to any italian or jewish or native, and while i've seen pictures of my grandfather's mother (who was french canadian), his father's ancestry remains a serious mystery, and is likely some combination of jewish, eastern african and native american. 

i'm simply too far removed from an ancestry outside of this province to have any attachment to it.

but, culturally, i'd rather be norwegian than italian.

fwiw, i have no particular attachment to italy. i know i have italian ancestry, but i'd never identify myself as italian.

i was not raised with any italian heritage; i wasn't even aware of it until i was in my mid-teens. you know how i learned this? i invited a zito over to my house for a school project in the 8th grade, and my dad told him that his mother's name was zito. i had no idea up until that point; i would have told people he was french. 

i don't speak italian. i wasn't raised religiously. 

the most italian thing about me is that i eat a lot of pasta. really.

i'd identify more readily as norwegian, from my mother's side, which is a culture i feel a stronger affinity with.

but, i'm a canadian. my ancestors come from 20 different countries, and i'm not really strongly connected to any of them. the only language i speak is english, but i actually have no english heritage. i probably look more jewish than anything else...

but, i like the culture of the northern european barbarian more than i like the settled culture of southern europe or the middle east, and would prefer to identify with the later rather than the former.

why is italy getting hit with mortality rates more similar to china and the united states than mortality rates comparable to other oecd countries?

that's a complicated question that i'm not ready to take a guess at, and that is no doubt not particularly pressing to the people on the ground. but, i can point a few things out about italy.

italy actually has an unusually high poverty rate for a western europe country; it's poverty rate is actually comparable to that in the united states, which is unusual for western europe. it's a country with a lot of open markets and public functions, which is different from much of northern europe - but so is spain. 

this article suggests that italy just has an unusually high number of very old people, so, oddly, it's high mortality rate is a consequence of it's longer average lifespan:

https://inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-italy-why-so-bad-cases-deaths-lockdown-northern-areas-explained-2444517

these are things that will need to be worked out over time.

for right now, it is an outlier on the continent, and i suspect that this isn't all that surprising to most europeans.

if you remove italy from the dataset, the mortality rate in europe remains under 1%. 

they've done studies and concluded that people watching fox are actually less informed than people that don't watch the news at all. 

i'd like to see these studies replicated for msnbc and cnn. it's no doubt just as true, and maybe even worse. 

just turn your tv off. it's fucking trash. all of it.

so, you'll note that as more testing has been done in the united states, they've found hundreds of more cases and the mortality rate has gone from ~7% to ~3.5-4%, which is about on par with that in china.

the people arguing for hundreds of unreported cases have been proven right, and the smug idiots in the culturally liberal msm have been proven wrong. again.

will it come down more than that? i don't know. i just knew that the mortality rate in the united states was higher than logic would suggest that it should be, and something wasn't adding up. there had to be more cases than that.

but, the numbers are making more sense, now. what's next is an open question - can the united states bring it's numbers down to the levels in western europe? or are the results of it's health care system fundamentally more in line with china's?

the experiment is playing out, and we'll find out.